Mourning Shall Pass
by mari4212
Summary: Susan, at the funeral


Susan stood quietly, her jaw locked, her eyes dry and unfocused, her black-clad form seemingly oblivious to both the muggy heat of the late summer afternoon and the concerned gazes of her family's friends. She heard their whispers, the half-hearted murmurs about how it was such a shame to lose them all at once, and with Edmund and Lucy still so young! She ignored their comments to each other about how the experience seemed to have aged her beyond her years as she looked ahead at the burial plot and the five empty graves clustered together, their brown maws stark against the brilliant green of the grass around. She could not bear to look further, to glance to the sides and see the brightly polished caskets that collectively held everyone who had mattered to her.

She'd experienced loss before. When her father had gone off to fight, and Peter had forced himself to grow up too fast to protect the rest of them, she had spent entire nights weeping, mourning the loss of her familiar old life. But that paled before this.

When they'd fallen back out of the wardrobe, and she'd known, instantly, that they wouldn't get back through there to the Narnia she'd grown to be a woman in, the Narnia filled with the people and Talking Beasts that she'd loved, again she had wept. She had only moved past her grief at that loss when the war had ended and her father had returned unscathed.

When Aslan had told her that she would never again return to Narnia, she'd been beyond tears. It had not felt possible, and she had never understood how Peter had stood there, back unbowed, eyes dry, telling Edmund and Lucy that he thought he could bear it. In her grief, and later her rage at being denied the only place she'd ever felt at home in, she'd denied everything about Narnia. If Narnia was only a story made up by her brothers and sister, the loss of it couldn't possibly destroy her, now could it?

She had lived each day with that denial, forbidding Lucy from telling her anything about the adventure she and Edmund and Eustace had experienced when she returned from America. She had dived head first into every distraction she could find, other girls her age who felt so much younger than she, make-up which she wore as a mask, fancy dresses than never looked as beautiful or felt as comfortable as her Narnian gowns, boys sillier than Rabadash the Ridiculous had ever been. Every moment filled, every second spent rushing here and there, because if she was still for an instant, the pain and the longing for just one more breath of Narnian air became more than she could imagine.

She had lived through each of those losses, each time hardly knowing how she could stand the pain, was all that work only to prepare her for this?

The priest's sonorous voice wove through her ruminations, but only scattered words from the old Anglican order of burial penetrated to her distracted mind. Slowly, she steeled herself and turned her gaze from the empty pits awaiting her family and towards their caskets. Her mother and father's caskets were ordinary, she supposed. But some instinct had made her ask that the finials on her siblings' caskets be finished with lion's heads, not the simple brass knobs. Somehow she knew Peter, Edmund, and Lucy would want it that way, with the reminders of Narnia even at the end of their lives. After all, they had never forgotten Narnia, and never denied it either, unlike her.

As her gaze swept over Lucy's coffin, the sunlight flashed against the brass finishings, and the lion's head knob changed. She knew, even before his voice seemed to reverberate inside her mind, Aslan was now here.

"Susan," he said, his voice tender and stern and solemn. "Daughter of Eve, why did you run from me? Why did you turn away from what I had shown you?"

At that moment, the emotions she'd spent so long fighting and suppressing burst forth, and she wept. Inside of herself she sobbed, "I couldn't. I couldn't do that; I couldn't remember you and Narnia and cope. It was too much. I'm not strong, I've never been the strong one. That was always Peter and Lucy and even Edmund. I wasn't strong enough to remember you and live, knowing I couldn't go back"

Aslan's voice became softer, but reproachful, "Dear one, do you think I would have given you that burden had I intended you to always bear it alone? Why did you feel that you could not look to your siblings for support? They were meant to help you, as you were meant to help them. You would have found the strength in time."

Somehow, the gentleness with which he reprimanded her made her feel his reproach all the more keenly. Had she failed that much, by despairing when hope had still existed? She flushed in shame.

"Enough," Aslan said. "Do not waste more of your life on regrets for what has passed. It is done. Your life is before you, live it as befits a woman who was once queen of Narnia. You have time to move beyond your foolish mistakes and become the woman you were born to be. I shall be with you at all times, though you will not see me. And in that, take heart. You will see your family again."

With that, he was gone, and Susan was again aware of the world around her. The conversation had lasted only seconds, the priest's words, "yea though weeping shall last the night, still joy cometh in the morning" still ringing in her ears. But worlds of perceptions had changed. She still mourned the loss of her family, but now she felt strong enough to endure the pain and move on, strength to remember the woman she had once been, and become that woman again, for their sakes, and for her own.


End file.
